Posted by The WORD in other words (2018) by Fr Fred Saniel SVD – Divine Word Institute of Mission Studies, Tagaytay City
Friday 7th Week in Ordinary Time
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
In my conversations with couples during their silver or golden wedding anniversaries, I am told that faithfulness from the heart is the secret ingredient of long marriages. Whether their lives experience beauty or the harsh realities of life, the heart is their sanctuary which empowers them to praise God in times of successes and to ask for his protection in times of crises and difficulties.
Thank God that Christian marriage is truly a living sacrament of His own love that resides deep within the human heart.
Christian marriage is truly a covenant of three, not two, hearts – the hearts of married couples immersed in the heart of God who is love. Man and woman enter into this life-long commitment to love and cherish one another with all their hearts in the spirit of God’s love in each of them.
God’s heart of love makes the marriage strong and unbreakable. Even in the midst of tensions and conflicts, as a number of married couples have attested, the bonds of love become stronger because it is God’s love that strengthens those bonds.
In broken marriages, the loving heart of God had disappeared because the reasons for the break-up come from the weaknesses of the flesh – infidelity, discomfort and inconveniences, money, pleasure. These evils destroy the spirit of God’s love in the couple’s hearts.
When couples submit themselves to these evils, marriage enters its dark age. When the darkness of sin prevails, couples become blind to respecting and cherishing one another. Disabled from seeing, their separation follows.
Jesus said: “What God has joined together, no human being must separate!” May the hearts of all married couples remain in the spirit of God’s love that they may bear witness to God’s love in the world today.
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